The name of the project is inspired by the MPEG video standards group, together with "FF" for "fast forward".[8] The logo uses a zigzag pattern that shows how MPEG video codecs handle entropy encoding.[9]

FFmpeg is part of the workflow of hundreds of other software projects, and its libraries are a core part of software media players such as VLC, and has been included in core processing for YouTube and the iTunes inventory of files. Codecs for the encoding and/or decoding of most of all known audio and video file formats is included, making it highly useful for the transcoding of common and uncommon media files into a single common format.

The project was started by Fabrice Bellard[7] (using the pseudonym "Gérard Lantau") in 2000, and was led by Michael Niedermayer from 2004 until 2015.[10] Some FFmpeg developers were also part of the MPlayer project.

On January 10, 2014, two Google employees announced that over 1000 bugs had been fixed in FFmpeg during the previous two years by means of fuzz testing.[11]

In January 2018, the ffserver command-line program – a long-time component of FFmpeg – was removed.[12] The developers had previously deprecated the program citing high maintenance efforts due to its use of internal application programming interfaces (API).[13]

The project publishes a new release every three months on average. While release versions are available from the website for download, FFmpeg developers recommend that users compile the software from source using the latest build from their source codeGitversion control system.[14]

Two video coding formats with corresponding codecs and one container format have been created within the FFmpeg project so far. The two video codecs are the lossless FFV1, and the lossless and lossy Snow codec. Development of Snow has stalled, while its bit-stream format has not been finalized yet, making it experimental since 2011. The multimedia container format called NUT is no longer being actively developed, but still maintained.[15]

In summer 2010, Fiona Glaser, Ronald Bultje, and David Conrad of the FFmpeg Team announced the ffvp8 decoder. Through testing, they determined that ffvp8 was faster than Google's own libvpx decoder.[16][17] Starting with version 0.6, FFmpeg also supported WebM and VP8.[18]

libavfilter is the substitute for vhook which allows the video/audio to be modified or examined between the decoder and the encoder. Filters have been ported from many projects including MPlayer and avisynth

Various application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) related to video and audio compression and decompression do exist. Such ASIC can perform the computation for audio/video decompression or compression partly or fully to offload these from the host CPU. To make use of such ASIC, instead of a complete implementation of some algorithm, only the API is required. There are numerous ASICs and APIs available, of which several are supported by FFmpeg.[23]

Internal hardware acceleration decoding is enabled through the -hwaccel option. It starts decoding normally, but if a decodable stream is detected in hardware, then the decoder designates all significant processing to that hardware, thus accelerating the decoding process. Whereas if no decodable streams are detected (as happens on an unsupported codec or profile), hardware acceleration will be skipped and it will still be decoded in software. -hwaccel_device option is applied when the hardware requires a particular device to function especially there are several graphic cards are available.

^Y210 (YUYV 10bpc) is not supported. UYVY 10bpc without a padding is supported as bitpacked codec in FFmpeg. UYVY 10bpc with 2-bits padding is supported as v210 codec in FFmpeg. 16bpc (Y216) is supported as targa_y216 codec in FFmpeg.

FFmpeg contains more than 100 codecs,[43] most of which use compression techniques of one kind or another. Many such compression techniques may be subject to legal claims relating to software patents.[44] Such claims may be enforceable in countries like the United States which have implemented software patents, but are considered unenforceable or void in member countries of the European Union, for example.[citation needed]

In June 2011 an election was organized to establish the board of FFmtech foundation,[45] a non-profit organization dedicated for managing donation funds. It was designed to offer reimbursement for expenses and work done to FFmpeg and Libav. However, according to FFmpeg developer Ronald Bultje, the results have been doubtful.[46]

On March 13, 2011, a group of FFmpeg developers decided to fork the project under the name "Libav".[52][53][54] The event was related to an issue in project management, in which developers disagreed with the leadership of FFmpeg.[55][56][57]

^FFmpeg can be configured to make it proprietary and unredistributable software, because NVIDIA Performance Primitives, an optional external library, is proprietary software and cannot be distributed under the terms of the GPL.